Monthly Archives: January 2021

Another New Recipe

I have a number of subjects in mind for the post. As I sit here typing I have a sausage casserole on the go. I can hear it bubbling gently. It’s rich, smooth and looks delicious. If it was human, it would be me. That’s how good it is. Julia has just looked over my shoulder, muttered “Tell them it’s simple too.” and gone off laughing at her own joke.

The original recipe is from the Hairy Bikers. Onions, garlic paste, beans, sausages (ready browned), tinned tomatoes, tomato puree, a stock cube, Worcester sauce, Cajun seasoning. The recipe called for chilli and herbs but I had Cajun seasoning. Can’t see that one small alteration will change the fine dining experience much. And yes, she’s right, it’s not complicated. This is particulalrly trie as I just prodded the stock cube into the mix, added a splash of water and simmered for about ten minutes in total – quicker than the original recipe. Actually, now that I look at the recipe, I see I may have left a few other bits out. It was still, very good, despite this.

I imagine it would be good without the sausages too, and as tins of chopped tomatoes and tins of beans are good store cupboard items this will make an excellent quick and easy meal for unexpected visitors. Or the times when you get the shopping list wrong, as I did this week. And I thought I’d done so well…

We will be eating it with the last of the cheese and tomato bread Julia made during the week.

We toasted the cheese and tomato bread with the lunchtime avocado and poached eggs. I make it under protest because Julia likes it. And I refuse to have an egg with it – it’s neither use nor ornament. Avocado without prawns and Marie Rose sauce (aka mayonnaise and ketchup) is a complete waste of time. I also hate poaching eggs, there’s always some new disaster associated with them. This week they seem to have welded themselves to the pan and ladle. (I thought I’d try containing them in the ladle again as it nearly worked last time.) It seems like a good idea but it hasn’t worked out either time I’ve tried it. However, at least it wasn’t as bad as the time before when I swirled the water etc.. That ended up looking like an explosion in an ectoplasm factory.

No photos of the avocado as it’s too sad to record. Have I really become the sort of man who eats avocado on toast? The photo of the sausage casserole could do with more sausage showing, as it just looks like bread and beans. I thought there was plenty of sausage to see, but in the camera they seem to have merged with the beans.

Drifting Thoughts

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Work went well yesterday and by 2.00 I had the parcels packed and in the post. I walked back into the shop thinking that my next move should be to ring Julia and tell her that I would be able to pick her up. This is always a problem on Friday as she finishes a bit earlier than normal and it can be a bit difficult.

As I got back to the computer I realised that we had a new order. It was for one gum card (Alma Cogan from the A&BC Who-Z-At Star Series, 1961). That’s easy enough – compliments slip, into a holdr (we have some left over from a stamp collection we bought) , into a board backed envelope, first class stamp and address.

While I was doing that another order came in – banknote. Same again. Easy to find and simple to pack.

Then another came in. He wanted fifty different items. I haven’t a clue where half of them are…

So Julia didn’t get a lift home last night and I worked late. However, as I’m currently being paid for my full week for working one day, I can’t really complain if I have to work a bit longer.

It’s amazing how quickly I adjust. When I started full time work at the age of 16 we used to do five nine hour days, then I moved to doing six eight hour days. We had two weeks holiday in those days. Am I sounding old and crusty?

Now I do six hour days and have four weeks holiday. I work Saturdays but have Sundays and Wednesdays off (the latter being my choice so I get a day off when Julia does). It’s not hard. In fact I’d like to do longer days, as it hardly seems worth it to go in for six hours. The strange thing is that I still feel tired by the end of the week. It’s not just an age thing, because I know someone a lot younger than me who has similar hours and he complains about how onerous his working life is.

I think we’ve just got softer as a nation. At the risk of sounding like one of the Four Yorkshiremen, there are people who are just ten years younger than me who think they are badly done to as they work 35 hours and week and have a month off, plus Bank Holidays. For the sake of my American readers, who are probably reading this with an expression of disbelief, here is how the rest of the world does it. Even Kazakhstan and South Sudan have better holiday provision than you do.

Work, gum cards, holidays, snowflakes – amazing where a blog can take you.

21-21-21-21 and Bacon and Potato Hotpot

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Nine o’clock last night was, Julia tells me, the 21st hour of the 21st day of the 21st year of the 21st Century. Unfortunately she didn’t tell me until later so I was unable to savour the moment. I will have to wait until 10pm on 22nd January 2122 for the next similar event. I suspect that despite advances in medical science I’m not going to be around for that.

I had another go at bacon casserole this week. The last attempt, the Panhaggerty, wasn’t quite right so I looked for a new recipe and gave it a try. I didn’t make a note of the recipe and can’t find it again. However, don’t despair – there are hundreds of them if you want one, or try this.

Cut potatoes into slices, I used about five potatoes of about medium size. Par boil. I did them for five minutes, I may give them 7 next time, though five worked.

You probably should cut onions into rings as it will look better. I had some ready chopped onion and three small leeks so I used them.

Bacon bits.

Black pepper, stock cube, grated cheese.

Fry the bacon and then soften the onions/leeks.

Put in a layer of potato, the onions/leeks and another layer of potato, then bacon, then potato. I used freshly ground black pepper on each layer of potato (it’s easier to see how much you put on if you add it that way. The dishes I used are about an inch and a half deep so that’s enough layers.

Make the stock and pour it in until it nearly covers the potatoes. Cover with foil, cook for an hour at 200 C/400 F for an hour. When I prodded the potato at the hour mark it was still a bit hard, so I may give it an extra couple of minutes boiling next time.

Uncover, put the cheese on top and put it in the oven. I gave it thirty minutes and turned the oven up. The recipe suggested 15 minutes for browning but I was watching a half hour programme on TV. At least it cooked the potato properly. It also formed a nice golden crust and reduced the gravy nicely.

It was a bit salty for our low salt tastes, probably due to the bacon.

Next time I’m going to make a vegetarian version with carrots and parsnips, and possibly without cheese.

I haven’t made hotpot for twenty years, and am not sure why. Looks like we will be having more of it from now on.

Potato and Bacon Casserole

Haiku – Ducks

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Mallard in winter sunshine

duck calls
over winter water
one yellow leaf floats by

First Published in Wales Haiku Journal Autumn 2018

Another day, Another List

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Determined to make up for my slow start to the week I wrote a list of jobs for Wednesday. The good news is that I completed the shopping list and think I managed to put everything on it (so many weeks I suddenly remember I’ve missed something off as it becomes too late to add anything). I also wrote the blog post for the day and typed a few haiku that were lying dormant in my notebooks. I need a few for the end of the month so this seems like a timely activity.

We also watched Father Brown this afternoon and ate the fresh bread that Julia had baked. It’s a tomato and cheese bread from a kit and, nicely crusty as a result of her use of the “Crusty” setting. It’s so long since I’ve used the bread maker that I had forgotten there was a setting for crustiness. If only I’d thought to put those two activities on the list.

The rest of the list did not go so well. It rarely does.

I conspicuously failed to shred the box of old documents by the side of the shredder, forgot to ring the Pharmacy with my PORN number, didn’t do any of my online course (I have lost the habit since they messed me about with the password change) and forgot to do anything about the casserole until too late (it needs two hours in the oven).

Sorry, what was that? You want to know why the Pharmacy wants a PORN number off me. It’s a Personal Order Reference Number. I really don’t know what you were thinking…

Nor, to be fair, do I know what the inventor of the PORN acronym was thinking of. I thought of making it one of my tags, but didn’t want to disappoint anyone, or attract the sort of readers who would be disappointed by this.

That’s a fair summary of my day. Nothing bad happened. On the plus side, though I didn’t pull up any (metaphorical) trees, we watched Father Brown and ate warm home made bread with cheese and pickles. I have had many days that have been worse than this. Judging from the weather forecast, I had a better day than a lot of people who are having snow and floods.

A Tuesday Retrospective

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I seem to be having a week of looking back on the previous day. I’m not sure how this happened but I may as well go with it, and try to catch up.

My alarm went off at 6.30, which was cutting it a bit fine to get to the hospital for a blood test before work, but I didn’t really feel like getting up. In the end I turned over and went back to sleep anyway, finally shaking myself free of the covers at just before 7.00 It was still dark so there were no interestingly lit morning shots.

Down to the hospital, in to the waiting room, and there was nobody else there. Even so, I still had to wait five minutes for someone to conclude their conversation and deal with me. Five minutes isn’t a long time to wait, but when you want to get done and take your wife to work, it’s long enough.

The sample was easy, and taken using a syringe rather that all the modern paraphernalia. It didn’t bleed after she removed the needle, which is always a worry, a it suggests the clotting is too good.

I was home for 8am, as the murky grey night slid into a murky grey morning. Typical – the morning I think of photography, there is nothing to photograph. Julia was ready and we set off for work. There seems to be more traffic about again – some days you wouldn’t guess there is a lockdown in progress. It seems from a news article that numbers in schools are up on last time, which suggests that more people are going to work, and probably more are being accepted as keyworkers.

Julia has just been given a letter from work to confirm her keyworker status. She was a key worker working from home in the first lockdown and a keyworker at work for the second. They gave her a badge for that. She’s now a keyworker at work, and she has just been given a letter to prove it. It’s printed on a black and white printer, has handwritten amendments and, quite frankly, looks like a bad attempt at a forgery.

This is typical of the way the project is managed. Several of the staff who ran for the hills last week, have returned. A cynic might suggest that it’s better than spending time at home with the kids, or that it’s an attempt to make sure they don’t miss out on their vaccination.

Next, I went to the pharmacy to wait in the rain, collect inaccurate prescriptions and try to make sense of the chaos. The electronic ordering system I am compelled to use by the NHS is a lot less accurate than the old one where you used to and pick up a piece of paper. I think I may have mentions (just once or twice) that although change is easy, improvement is hard. I may even have mentioned that “new and improved” systems are often not improved, and sadly are often not even as good as the one they replace. Part of the sorting process was ringing to give the pharmacy a reference number. I must have tried 20 times and the phone was either busy or unanswered.

Not long after I returned home, I missed a call from the doctor and had to ring back. It took twenty minutes, but I persisted as I thought they might be helping to sort out the double cock-up they have made with my prescriptions.

Photo by Karolina Grabowska on Pexels.com

No such luck. They were ringing to tell me my blood tests were done (they can be very quick when they want to be). I failed. The blood is clotting too well and I have to raise my dose of warfarin and go back for a blood test next week.

That takes me up to 11.30 and gives you a flavour of the day. That is, I think, a good place to finish. It is now just after mis-day and Julia is engaged in her second long work call of the day, despite it being her day off. I’m going to start making noise now, as a sign that we have better things to do.

Blue Monday – Fact or Fiction?

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Yesterday was “Blue Monday”. It’s supposedly the most depressing day of the year. However, it’s something developed by a travel company in 2005. Wikipedia calls it pseudoscience, and nonsense. That is charitable. Like so many things that have a presence on the web, it is plausible and has taken on a life of its own.

I can’t help thinking that if the third Monday in January is the most depressing day of the year you are not leaving yourself much to look forwards to in the remaining 347 days of the year. If you read the Wiki entry it is clear that the whole thing is nonsense.

I can believe that the middle of January isn’t the most cheery time of the year, It’s dark, cold and wet. You spent too much money at Christmas, put weight on and have just about broken all your New Year Resolutions. It’s not going to be a cheerful time of the year, unless you live south of the Equator, where it is midsummer, and a very different January to mine.

I had a more depressing time last week – four days off the road, large bill for car repairs and sprinkle of disappointment from work being refused by editors. That was depressing. Blue Monday was merely a dreary day.

It seems that April and May are the peak time for suicide, which tends to suggest that the most depressing day of the year might actually be there. It also seems that lockdown is affecting mood, with a quarter of people reporting at least one mental health problem during the first lockdown and one in ten having suicidal thoughts.

I had a great time in the first one – it was basically a paid holiday with Julia, in summer. We had no work to go to, no worries and, more importantly, plenty of space and no home schooling because the kids are out of the way. I actually feel guilty about this, because it must have been horrific for some people.

Lockdown 2 was a bit depressing, but number 3 is going OK. Not as good as Number 1 but I decided to approach it in a positive manner and so far it’s working. It hasn’t been as successful or productive as I wanted it to be, but it’s still been quite good.

If today was as bad as it gets, I’ll be happy. Somehow I think there is a lot of potential for things to get worse.

I thought I’d add a picture of a shopping list. Now that I shop online I don’t use shopping lists anymore. Who would have thought that shopping lists would be a victim of Covid?

Book Review – The Mazaroff Mystery

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I read this directly after The Windsor Knot. They are very different books.

The Windsor Knot is a modern whodunnit with a good helping of originality, a novelty detective and an undercurrent of humour.

The Mazaroff Mystery is a Golden Age detective novel, published in 1928. There is nothing original about it, the detective is not unusual (a young man looking for amusement after serving as an officer in the Great War) and there is no humour. It lacks depth, including themes you would expect in a modern novel – class, race and sex, – and the protagonist has suffered no mental or physical problems as a result of his war service. The world of the Golden Age detective novel was largely white, middle class and not given to introspection. Peter Wimsey suffered from shell shock, but the rest of that generation seem remarkably unscathed.

The authors are both fine writers, the characterisation is good, and the plots both have the odd weak spot. The pacing of the older book is superior, as is the quality of the red herrings and the supporting characters.

I would say that if you want a book for entertainment, get The Windsor Knot. If you want a good detective novel, The Mazaroff Mystery is the one to go for. Unless you are looking for historical detective fiction.

I notice one or two people in the reviews, seem to think it is historical fiction, some liking its authenticity, and at least one complaining that it is old-fashioned. Well, it would be. it’s 93 years old. The author was born in 1863, just four years after Conan Doyle and two years before Kipling. I always think of those two as Victorians. The surprise isn’t that the book is old-fashioned, the surprise is that it is quite fresh and contemporary rather than being rooted in Victorian days. He was, by the way, the favourite mystery writer of Woodrow Wilson

It’s well worth a read if you like Golden Age whodunnits, and is currently available on Kindle for £0.77.

Writing, but more importantly, Reading

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Just before falling asleep in the early hours of the morning I had an idea. This time I had my pad and pen ready and I wrote a quick note to myself.

This morning I felt like a proper writer. I so far as I am a person who puts words down on paper so that others can read them, I suppose I can call myself a writer. IN the sense of someone who makes marks on paper with a writing instrument so that I can read them later, the situation is not so clear cut. I’d definitely done something that approximated to writing on my pad. The marks were there. But it lacked the important element of me being able to read it later

It’s a bit like Mallory’s (possible) conquest of Everest. If you don’t get back down have you really conquered the mountain?

I stared at the riot of loops and whirls, done with a scratchy and slightly dry fibre tip pen and began to panic. Is this, I asked myself, what dementia feels like?

Anyway, as my eyes recalibrated themselves for the grey morning light (I find that they no longer lap into action these days but take a while to get going, much like the rest of me) a few words started to show . Even then, in the absence of memory, no meaning emerged. This isn’t surprising as a number of the words I seem to have used have escaped the notice of the OED. There were 28 words in the note, for several minutes, and several readings, I couldn’t read a single word. It took another few minutes to extract half a dozen words, then it all fell into place.

Our the lent fen gus I line swiss by cuckolded winter. Blog beige abunt layings and precurstractor has benignly bun the wounded layet hucid hut for my new carver.

When I say “all fell into place” I may be exaggerating slightly. It took another effort before my synapses fired up.

Over the last few years I have seriously considered becoming a content writer. Blog being about laziness and procrastination has basically been the longest suicide note for my new career.

In other words, if you want to use a blog to get writing jobs, don’t blog about being lazy and unreliable.

As it turns out, while I was considering the new career the market was flooded with students offering to write for next to nothing, so I didn’t actually lose anything.

quercuscommunity

Life after the Care Farm